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AURORAS

Ulysses

Jupiter can tell scientists about the solar system's origins—and one of Juno's main goals is to uncover that history. But tiny particles of interstellar dust also have a story to tell. Interstellar gas and dust are important ingredients for building planetary systems. This material fills the vast stretches of interstellar space, and some of it can penetrate the huge protective bubble that the sun's magnetic field and the solar wind forms around the solar system. Until its mission ended in 2009, the Ulysses spacecraft—in addition to studying Jupiter and the solar wind—sampled grains of interstellar dust, joining the Cassini and Stardust spacecraft in the quest to understand the interstellar medium.